Lawyers think detainee sleep deprived

Guantanamo Bay's 'Sandman' program used, papers show

William Glaberson, New York Times

Published
4:00 am PDT, Tuesday, July 15, 2008

A week before what could be the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II, defense lawyers claimed Monday that an accused detainee might have been subjected to a program of systematic sleep deprivation that they said would constitute torture.

It was the latest in a series of recent accusations about the use of sleep disruption in the past at the detention camp here. Some critics say the assertions undermine a perception fostered by officials that the most aggressive interrogation techniques were used only occasionally at Guantanamo.

The lawyers for the detainee facing trial, Salim Hamdan, said that on Saturday prosecutors for the first time gave them information indicating Hamdan entered "Operation Sandman" on June 11, 2003, and remained in the program for 50 days.

Operation Sandman has been described as an interrogation plan devised with military psychiatrists for systematically interrupting a detainee's sleep. "Sleep deprivation of that nature for 50 days would constitute torture," said one of Hamdan's lawyers, Joseph M. McMillan.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, did not respond directly to the accusations but said it was military policy "to treat detainees humanely."

"We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees," Gordon added.

Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who co-wrote a book on the treatment of detainees, said several recent accounts of systematic sleep deprivation were a challenge to what he described as a strategy by detention officials "to respond to allegations of abuse at Guantanamo by contending that the abuse was aberrational and perpetrated by rogue interrogators."

Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, faces charges of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

The disclosure came as hearings began Monday in preparation for Hamdan's war crimes trial, now scheduled to open on July 21. On Thursday in Washington, lawyers for Hamdan are to ask a federal district judge to stop the trial with the claim that the military commission system violates the Constitution.

But as the military judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, pressed on with hearings this week, the defense lawyers said information about what appeared to be the use of the sleep deprivation program was an unexplained entry in some 600 pages of detention records provided by prosecutors after a court order.

Hamdan's lawyers have said previously that he was beaten when he was first in custody in Afghanistan in 2001 and that he was subsequently subjected to sexual humiliation and severe isolation at Guantanamo, where he has been held since 2002.

In another detainee's case, a military lawyer, Maj. David J. R. Frakt, wrote that documents showed that his client, a teenager at the time, was moved from cell to cell 112 times during a 14-day period in 2004 to keep him in a state of sleepless disorientation.

In accounts dealing with other detainees, officials have written that sleep deprivation was used to soften up detainees before interrogations. A May report by the Justice Department inspector-general said U.S. military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantanamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Uighur detainees, waking them every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese.